February 2015

The current exhibition of paintings, watercolors, and prints by Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Alexander and Bonin (March 16–April 28, 2012) got me thinking once again about the different kinds of spaces she has constructed in her work, beginning with the tilting planes in her early paintings, such as “Floor 1″ (1967), “Floor with Light at Noon” (1972), and “Two Exact Rules on a Dark and Light Floor” (1975), all done in acrylic on canvas.

What degree of willful perversity is required to think of Peter Saul as heir to Velázquez? Perhaps as much as it takes to plunk a Peter Saul show inside the ultra-blue-chip Mary Boone Gallery, but that’s where we find ourselves on the eve of All Fool’s Day, 2012.

If the price of everything is going up, it’s nice to see when some things go down in cost, even if it’s only temporary. The Bronx Museum announced this week that they will be dropping their admission fee in an effort to increase their attendance and reach out to members of the community who haven’t stepped inside.

MTV is trying to rekindle the “visual playground” of the 1980s and they hope the new art commercials by Rashaad Newsome, Mickalene Thomas, Tala Madani, Jani Ruscica and Mads Lynnerup will help them do it.

If most people think of contemporary Baltimore as the land of John Waters, then maybe the Baltimore Museum of Art’s growing presence on the contemporary art scene may help diversify people’s perceptions beyond the drag queen Divine and campy gay bars. The museum announced details yesterday about their renovation currently in progress on its contemporary wing.

Bruno Wollheim’s David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is a much more straightforward account than Jack Hazan’s 1974 movie A Bigger Splash. It brings Hockney’s life full circle — the earlier film followed the artist’s move from London to Los Angeles while Wollheim’s film deals with Hockney’s return many years later to his childhood stomping grounds of East Yorkshire.

CHICAGO — The Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago is currently showing a fascinating series of collaborations between visual artists and writers such as Robert Creeley, Philip Guston, Larry Rivers, Karen Randall and Jim Dine. Poems and Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946-1981) is a useful and concrete example of the most basic form of interdisciplinary art — combining words and images produced by the highest practitioners of those forms, to observe “the extraordinary occasions when these things and activities fuse, introducing a third element,” as the well-written curator’s essay puts it.

With the hype surrounding the Cindy Sherman blockbuster retrospective on the 6th floor, which critics have almost unanimously praised, I was surprised to find that the most invigorating, exciting and generally mind-blowing exhibition at MoMA right now is Exquisite Corpses.